


The Birthday

by ElizaHiggs



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Anxiety, Book 7: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, F/M, Love, Marriage, Sex, Wizard Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-11 22:17:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7072660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElizaHiggs/pseuds/ElizaHiggs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tonks confronts her husband's anxiety | M rating for sexual content</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Birthday

**Author's Note:**

> I own none of these characters

We Apparate back to our flat. We've just left Harry's birthday party - we were there for barely _five minutes_  - and I know my husband is having another breakdown. He has at least one per day, ever since I told him about the baby. He's collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table, and I go to make a pot of tea, just to have something to do while he rides it out, because my touch only seems to make things worse when this happens, and I'm beginning to worry we can't go on like this. 

We can't raise a baby like this.

I'm furious at the world. My husband can't even attend his best friend's son's coming-of-age party without the Ministry interfering. I know how desperately he wants to be there for Harry, especially since Sirius died, and he can't always, and it sucks, and there's nothing I can do. Nothing except make tea. I'm good at that, now, thanks to Molly Weasley. The only friend I really had, in the year Remus spent ignoring me, the only person who understood  _everything_ about my life - Remus, the Order, everything. She taught me the right temperatures for each kind of tea, how long each tea should brew, the ideal sweeteners. 

I set a mug of steeping darjeeling in front of my husband and sit down across from him, wait for him to raise his head up out of his hands. When he does, he looks like a man struggling to remember where he is and how he got there. He grasps the mug with both hands, and I see the control come down again across his face. "Thank you," he says softly.

I don't know what to say, but that's okay, because it's probably best if I don't say anything. 

I had known he didn't want children, and I was okay with that. I thought we might both feel differently, after the war, after we'd won. Once things could be better for our family. I hadn't known how much I'd wanted children until I was already pregnant and  _ecstatic,_ absolutely thrilled with the idea that I was carrying a baby that was half me and half Remus. I know he'll love his father, what child wouldn't love Remus? (Isn't there a whole generation of young witches and wizards who absolutely adore him, who remember him fondly as the best professor they'd had at Hogwarts?) But for some reason Remus can't see that. 

Once he's finished his tea, I take him by the hand and lead him to the bathroom, force him into shower. It's barely eight o'clock, but he needs sleep more than anything right now. Twenty minutes later, he climbs into bed, hair still damp, and he watches me wakefully as I change in our room. I slip out of my robes, my underthings. Let them fall to the floor. I slide into bed, climb on top of him, and he's already hard. 

His breathing is rough, and ragged, and I know what he's thinking, what he's _always_ thinking: that he doesn't deserve this, that he doesn't deserve love or comfort. But his hands grab eagerly for my hips when I kiss him, when I press my body against his. My hands trace down along his nightshirt, sliding his boxers over his hips. "Dora..." he whispers, and I freeze, thinking that he's going to tell me to stop. "I love you," he says simply, as helplessly and earnestly as a little child, and an unfamiliar emotion wells up inside me.

The night Mad-Eye died, Remus had been sure, for a few terrible hours, that I had died too - that I wasn't coming back to him. When I finally did make it back to the Burrow, I had thought he was angry with me. He'd asked me rather roughly what had kept Ron and I, and then acted like I wasn't in the room the rest of that terrible evening, and I'd never felt so alone. He still hadn't spoken to me by the time we'd returned to our own flat, and so I'd decided to shower, moving for the bathroom, but he'd stopped me, still silent, gripping my upper arm. He'd pulled me to him roughly and kissed me, and it wasn't a fierce kiss, but it was deep and intense and he smelled like curse smoke and blood and sweat and _Remus._ He turned me around, pressed his hips into my backside, and I could feel how hard he was as he trailed his hands down over my waist, fingers digging into my hipbones, and suddenly I wanted him just as insistently. I let loose my robes and gripped the back of a kitchen chair.

It was the first time we'd had sex in that position. Him behind me. I'd asked a few times, before I realized that the idea simply bothered him too much - too wolfish, I imagine - and so I'd stopped asking. I don't mind missionary, or being on top. But I will remember that time until the day I die.

I'm still not sure I can name the emotion I saw in him that night.  _Possessiveness_ isn't quite right, but then neither is love or worry or any of the usual suspects. 

Beneath me now, he's close to coming, and when he does, he moans my name - my real name - in the way I secretly love because he calls me that only in bed, and the satisfaction of the sound sends me over, too. 

Afterwards, I slide gently off him and wrap my arms around his shoulders, holding him, pulling his face into my chest. It doesn't take him long to drift off to sleep, but I stay awake for a while, stroking his hair and basking in the rare peace on his face.

And that's when I finally recognize the emotion I'd seen in him that night, because it's the same emotion I'm feeling now.

Protectiveness.

I would do anything to protect my husband. But how do you protect a man from his own mind?


End file.
